Why "make it pop" costs you money
Adjectives in a brief are undecided decisions. Each one becomes a revision round. Here is how to replace them.
"Make it pop." "Premium but approachable." "Clean, but with personality." Every designer has a collection of these, and every one of them cost the client money, because an adjective in a brief is not a description. It is a decision that has not been made yet, passed to the person least able to make it.
Find the adjective
Read the brief and circle every word that describes how the work should feel rather than what it should do or contain. Bold, modern, fresh, premium, human, authentic, dynamic. These are the words that will generate the first round of revisions, because each one means something different to the person who wrote it and the person who reads it. "Bold" to a marketing manager who has been living with a timid brand for five years is "restrained" to a designer who spent last week on a festival poster.
Ask what it would have to be instead
Every useful adjective is one end of a scale, and the other end is the information. Premium as opposed to what: everyday, mass-market, cheap? Modern as opposed to traditional, classic, heritage? Once the scale is named, the word stops being a compliment the work should deserve and becomes a position the work should occupy. Positions can be briefed. Compliments cannot.
Show two references that disagree
The fastest way to find out what you mean is to look at two pieces of work you both admire that sit at different points on the scale, and notice which one you reach for. People are unreliable at describing taste and reliable at recognising it. Five things you like and two you would not want, each with one reason, will do more than any paragraph, and where the picks contradict each other, that is the decision surfacing.
Pick one
This is the step that feels rude and is not. A brief that says "premium but approachable" has declined to choose between two things that pull against each other, and a designer will choose for you, silently, in the first draft. If the answer is genuinely in the middle, say "in the middle" and mean it; that is a position too. What cannot be briefed is both ends at once.
Write the choice, not the adjective
"Considered rather than energetic. Understated rather than bold. Warm rather than cool." Three lines, three decisions, and a designer knows where to stand. Compare that with "premium, modern, human", which is three compliments and no information, and which will cost you a round of work to translate.
What it costs
A revision round on a small motion job is a day or two. On a packaging range with a print deadline it can be a missed slot. On a website it is the week the copy was supposed to arrive. Each undecided adjective in the brief is, roughly, one of those. The arithmetic is not subtle; it is just never done at the briefing stage, where it is free.